Prisoner of Azkaban: Page 12
Ron's misguided phone call (what phone did he use?), Hermione's Victorian letter, how not to order a birthday present, and a deep dive into French wizarding tourism.
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Before we get into the nitty-gritty of Prisoner of Azkaban, page 12, there’s a caveat: my current go-to copy of PoA is the British edition, with a beautiful illustration of Harry casting his patronus on the cover. I bought it a few years ago at Waterstones Picadilly in London; I would have bought the entire series, but I don’t think it would have fit in my suitcase, plus I needed to conserve my money, because it turns out that compared to the Pound Sterling, one American dollar is basically worth a square of toilet paper.
So this page 12 won’t necessarily be the same as your page 12, if you’re reading the American edition or the Danish edition or any other edition. Well, maybe it will, but I can’t be certain. If you’re reading along, your devotion is admirable.
It’s Harry’s birthday, and most of the page is the letter that comes with Hermione’s present. Harry unwraps it and reads:
Dear Harry,
Ron wrote to me and told me about his phone call to your uncle Vernon. I do hope you’re all right.
Right off the bat, you get the sense that Harry’s situation might have been too delicate to risk inserting a phone call from a fellow wizard into the conversation. Ron has briefly encountered Uncle Vernon, when he, Fred, and George are rescuing Harry in Chamber of Secrets, so he knows Uncle Vernon’s whole je ne sais quoi. This first line of Hermione’s letter, really, gets at the essential difference between Hermione and the other two members of the trio, which is that she has common sense, and the other two, for all their virtues, really don’t. Ron knows how bad the Dursleys are; Harry has told him, and he’s seen it in person. But he still sees fit to make a phone call that he’s immediately aware has landed Harry in trouble. The guy, frankly, just doesn’t know how to think on his feet. Thankfully, Harry is, in fact, all right.
The other question this brings up is a simpler one: why does Hermione write like she’s a 77-year-old Mrs. Doubtfire? “I do hope you’re all right”? Hermione is well-read, but I’ve never gotten the sense that she enjoys Jane Austen novels or EastEnders or wherever this dialogue is coming from. I would say she’s just trying to sound educated, except that Hermione is incredibly secure in her own academic standing; she knows that she’s the smartest person around, and she knows that everyone else knows it too. She does have a few academic freak-outs later on, but this is a letter to Harry. She doesn’t need to demonstrate her superiority; they both know she’s the smartest of the bunch. The only conclusion left is that this is just the way she writes. She’s probably imitating something she’s read — that’s really where all writing style comes from — but it’s fun and interesting to think about what that might be. Does Hermione read literature? Muggle literature? What is her favorite book, and why is it “The Princess Bride”? Ok, maybe not, but admit it, that’s a fun answer to that question.
Her letter goes on:
I’m on holiday in France at the moment and I didn’t know how I was going to send this to you — what if they’d opened it at Customs? — but then Hedwig turned up! I think she wanted to make sure you got something for your birthday for a change. I bought your present by owl order; there was an advertisement in the Daily Prophet (I’ve been getting it delivered, it’s so good to keep up with what’s going on in the wizarding world). Did you see that picture with Ron and his family a week ago? I bet he’s learning loads, I’m really jealous — the Ancient Egyptian wizards were fascinating.
So, I picked a really bad time to talk about how Hermione has so much common sense. Basically, what she’s done here is found a birthday present for Harry that can be delivered via owl order...then had it delivered to herself…then brought it to France...while not knowing until the last minute that Hedwig was going to show up and give her a way to get it to Harry.
In college, I once sent my mother a woven blanket for Mother’s Day. I was living at school, far from my family, so I just ordered it shipped directly to my mother. What Hermione has done would be like if instead, I was going to send my mother a substance that was illegal in her country, and I had it delivered to myself, then traveled to a different country with tentative plans to send it through the international mail system back to my mother. For such a smart person, Hermione could have just...had...the...package...delivered...directly...to...Harry. Until Hedwig showed up, Hermione’s plan relied on the surprise intervention of wizards in the French postal service. Those people definitely exist, and I want to see a film noir about them, but sneaking a magical gift through international security systems seems a lot more difficult and risky than just writing “#4 Privet Drive” on the order form, and sending Harry a letter and a card separately.
I’ll have more to say on the “Broomstick Servicing Kit” whenever we get to the page on which the contents actually shows up. For now, I’ll just say that it seems mostly useless, like one of those products designed for people who enjoy the idea of being able to carry around a whole bunch of gadgets designed to solve any problem that could possibly arise, but who don’t actually encounter that many problems. The people who buy complicated, fold-up bartending kits containing tools to mix 149 different cocktails, even though the most complicated bartending task they ever have to perform is mixing rum and coke, are going to love the Broomstick Servicing Kit.
Hermione, meanwhile, is getting the Daily Prophet. Come to think of it, maybe that’s how she’s learned to write the way she’s writing: from quintessentially British, polite letters to the editor. “I do hope the Minister of Magic is receiving calm counsel in these uncertain times, and knowing that he is a man of kind character, I do believe this to be the case.” The good thing about a wizarding newspaper subscription is that it follows you wherever you go, as illustrated by Hagrid’s Daily Prophet arriving at the hut on the rock in book one. So Hermione isn’t going to get back to her house and find a pile of week-old Daily Prophet issues. This does raise some questions about just how magical the owls that deliver wizarding mail are, and how far and accurately they can fly in a day, but frankly, there’s a whole book to be written on that topic, so we’ll gloss over it for now. There’s not much else to be said about the Daily Prophet; it doesn’t really become a nasty illustration of unethical journalism until the next book. We do, later on, get a hint that the Prophet is running interference for Fudge — Mr. Weasley tells Mrs. Weasley something like “I don’t care what Fudge is telling the Daily Prophet, we’re no closer to catching Black than we are to inventing self-spelling wands” — but it’s not until later that the Prophet becomes so actively bad, so for now, Hermione is just reading the news.
Hermione has also seen the news about Ron’s trip to Egypt; of course, she’s focused first and foremost on vacation as a learning experience. Hermione is fantastic, of course, but it’s also clear why sometimes she can become the slightest bit much.
Her letter continues:
There’s some interesting local history of witchcraft here, too. I’ve rewritten my whole History of Magic essay to include some of the things I’ve found out. I hope it’s not too long, it’s two rolls of parchment more than Professor Binns asked for.
So Hermione is going around France touring wizarding historical sites? I hate to keep raising inconvenient questions, but doesn’t that make things awkward for her parents? Hermione’s parents are able, somehow, to enter Diagon Alley; are they similarly able to somehow bypass anti-Muggle security and experience wizarding tourist destinations in France? I have a feeling that being Muggle parents of a wizard has a lot more sway in one’s home country than abroad. In other words, it’s easy enough to imagine Hogwarts or the Ministry distributing passes to muggle parents so that they can accompany their children to Diagon Alley or Platform nine and three-quarters, but it’s a lot harder to imagine some random French Witch Museum admitting two dentists because they say they’re the wizard’s parents.
To be clear, it’s not impossible to imagine; maybe these French historical sites just admit people who show up, because they know that anyone who does is overwhelmingly likely to already know about the wizarding world. These sites probably have some sort of entrance security already that can only be navigated by wizards, so if Hermione escorts her parents in, that could be all the evidence needed that they have wizarding connections.
Finally, this is more of a general point about education than about Hermione’s overzealous schoolwork, but it really is just as important to learn to write short as to learn to write long. Sure, it’s a skill to be able to write a ten-page paper, but it’s also really important to know how to cut those ten pages down to three or four really good ones. Hermione’s two-rolls-too-long essay is probably full of interesting tidbits, but seeing how excited Hermione is, she probably couldn’t resist thickening it up with anecdotes that are cool, but not strictly related to the topic or her argument. Hermione needs a lesson in writing from William Zinsser (lol). This won’t happen, because Professor Binns is a freakin’ ghost and frankly never seems to expend much effort, but it would be great if he could pull Hermione aside. “I asked for one roll of parchment,” he could say. “You’ve given me a lot of really interesting material, a lot of things to think about. Now I’m going to need you to figure out how to put it all on one roll of parchment. And don’t make your handwriting any smaller. I’m hip to that trick.”
My only other question is, how long was the essay supposed to be? I can’t imagine it was supposed to be even one roll long, because even in later books, when assignments are presumably far longer because the trio has advanced to a higher school year, we see writing assignments that are given by length in inches rather than number of rolls, implying that the length is less than a single roll of parchment. And a roll, we know, is pretty long. In a later book, we see Hermione writing a letter to Viktor Krum on a single roll of parchment that hangs from her hand all the way down to the floor. So basically, I think the most likely scenario is that the assignment is for an essay of one roll of parchment or less, and Hermione has done at least 300% of that.
Ron says he’s going to be in London the last week of the holidays. Can you make it? Will your aunt and uncle let you come? I really hope you can. If not, I’ll see you on the Hogwarts Express on September the first!
Love from
Hermione
This actually raised a question for me that I hadn’t thought of before: what phone was Ron using when he called Harry, but got Uncle Vernon? I ask because this paragraph mentions again how Ron and Hermione are communicating independent of Harry, and I thought to myself, “it seems like Wizards should admit that Muggles got this one right, and adopt the telephone.” Then I wondered: wait a minute, how did Ron make a phone call?
Did he call from a public phone in the library? Some sort of wizarding phone to which he was granted access by Mr. Weasley? Now I’m just imagining Ron using a public phone in a diner or something (after all, it’s 1993), absolutely bellowing into it, “I ... WANT ... TO ... TALK ... TO ... HARRY ... POTTER!” Then he hangs up the phone, and the entire place is staring at him, and trying to blend in and play it cool, he says something like “You can never hear, am I right? That darn fellytone!”
It’s too bad we don’t get more wizarding phone action in the series. Mr. Weasley calling an auto mechanic, Fred and George calling a muggle joke shop...anything, really. The series could always use more humor, and here’s an easy way to do it. The wizarding version of “a guy walks into a bar” is basically “a wizard picks up a phone.”
That’s all for this page: Hermione’s letter ends as the page does. We’ll get all sorts of information as the book continues, and even in the early chapters, but for now, it’s just Harry getting his birthday presents. It’s so late — almost midnight, I believe — that Harry doesn’t even take the time to scribble thank-you notes to Ron and Hermione before he goes back to sleep. I can just imagine his note to Hermione.
“Dear Hermione — thank you for your gift! I’m so glad Hedwig showed up to help...but you do know that owls can deliver here too, right?”